The Wild History of Tetris

Tetris is an iconic game with a fascinating history. Dive in today to learn all about this classic puzzle game.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Das Vidania and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
Jerry's here too, man, this is stuff you should know. Comrade.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Yeah, the Tetris edition. How much Tetris have you played?
What's your background there?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
I was a very casual Tetris player. I mean I
didn't even realize there were as many levels as there are.
I tend to flip out when things start to really
go fast, So I wasn't very good at Tetris, but
I did enjoy it when I played it.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
And where'd you play it?

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Like?

Speaker 3 (00:46):
What system?

Speaker 2 (00:47):
The classic nees? Okay, how about you, Chuck, what is
your relationship to Tetris?

Speaker 4 (00:54):
Well, the only way I ever played it was on
a game Boy. I don't know if I had a
game Boy. If it was Scott's.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
I know he had one.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
But at any rate, I played it on the game
Boy only and really really loved it and got into
that for a while. I wasn't like obsessed with it
or anything, but I did have the Tetris streams. I
did walk around seeing things as Tetris on the landscape,
so it definitely invaded my consciousness for a while. But
I never played it on anything but the game Boy,

(01:24):
so I don't know how to play it with a
regular controller or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, I couldn't. Like I tried playing it on computer.
In it, I was like, I don't I can't get this.
I'm just used to the NYS controller for it.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Yeah. I was gonna try and play it today, just
like whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
I'm sure there's some free online version you can play
on your desktop, but I was afraid I was a
little behind.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
Today.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
I was like, I'm not going to do it because
I'll be thirty minutes later I will still been playing
Tetris because it's a very addictive game, and part of
why it was successful is because it seems like every
body that ever tried Tetris early on at least loved
and became pretty addicted to Tetris.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah. I was asking you and me. I was like,
did you ever play Tetris? And she just kind of
gave me this. She didn't even look over at me.
She just looked at them at me out of the
corner of her eyes and was like, I was pretty
good at Tetra.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Yeah I could see that.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah, come on, I never I didn't ask her if
she had the dreams, but I could see her having
the dreams. Apparently that's a really common phenomenon, right, I
think it's actually called the Tetris effect.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Uh, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
When it starts invading your dreams or you start you know,
if you're walking around a city and you start looking
at an alleyway that you could drop a long I
beam into, then it's in your bones.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah for sure. So yeah, we'll talk a little bit
about why it's so addictive. People have come up with
theories for it, like it's a video game that's so addictive.
Psychologists have actually come up with theories to explain why
Tetris in particular, not video games, Tetris in particular has
that Tetris effect and it's so addictive, which kind of

(03:02):
give you an idea of why. I think we talked
about this in our Minecraft episode that where I got
everything right that Tetris is actually the best selling game
of all time. Yeah, closing in on five hundred and
fifty million copies. Wow.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, that is a stackering number of people, man, right.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
And this video game hasn't been around since like the
eighteen hundred. It's like it's from nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
It's not Oregon Trail right right exactly.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
You can't catch dysentery playing it.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
No, and big thanks to Olivia for this one.

Speaker 4 (03:37):
I had this idea when I recently remembered that I
had not watched the Tetris Cold.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
War thriller movie.

Speaker 4 (03:45):
That is a very loose sort of story about how
this game was developed, because it's a very interesting story
set against the backdrop of the Cold War. They really
it's a fictionalized version, so it sort of loosely follows
some of it. But it looked like a really fun
movie that I'd kind of forgot about. So I asked

(04:06):
Lvia to put this together, and I'm gonna watch the
movie sometime this week, I think.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
So.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Is that huge chase scene where Alexi Pajetnov is chasing
the CIA agents across rooftops in Istanbul and catches up
with them and kills them with the garrot is made up?

Speaker 3 (04:22):
I think it is. And he was throwing Tetris pieces
at them and building Tetris walls. That's what the movie
they should have done.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, for sure, that would have been pretty cool. He
just like holds his hand out and instead of a
web coming out, it's Tetris pieces right in your face.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
All right.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
So you mentioned a guy that's very key to this.
In fact, he's the most key because he is the creator,
Alexi Pagetnov. The year's nineteen eighty four, very big key
year in American history in a lot of ways. And
he was working at a place called the Jerrod Nitsen
Computer Center CenTra, which is a part of the Soviet

(05:01):
Academy of Sciences, and he came up with this game
that he originally called Genetic Engineering. Great name eventually would
land on Tetris, but it was a copy initially of
his favorite puzzle game when he was a kid, called Pentomeno.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
I'm glad, yes you said it. It took me a
little while and I was like, oh, like Domino, but
with five.

Speaker 4 (05:26):
Yeah, exactly. And it was like any other puzzle. It
was a wooden box and you had these pieces, twelve
wooden tiles, each represented a different shape that can be
made with five squares, and it was just a physical thing.
It was in a rectangular, horizontal box and you would
just you know, it was one of those puzzles where
you would put the things in there and it wouldn't

(05:47):
make like an Elton John album cover. It would just
fit and you would be like, hey, I won I
fed all the pieces in here, right.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
So yeah, he basically took that and adapted it into
He's like, well, I'm going to totally evolutionized this. I'm
going to change the shapes from five boxes to four.
And so you can't call it pentomeno anymore because pent
is what five in Greek or Latin something.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
Like that, right, yeah, five squares.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, So he called it Tetris, named after Tetra. Yeah,
the Greek prefix meaning four, And apparently he also liked
tennis and wanted to give tennis a little shout out.
So that's what the iss is from Tetra Tennis Tetris.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (06:34):
In this initial version, like I said, it was called
genetic engineering, and at first it was just a horizontal
but he just basically did the exact same thing digitally
that he had in his physical I guess sitting in
his closet somewhere with pentomeno. It was a horizontal square
with these pieces that you would you know, click, I

(06:55):
don't know if you dragged at that point or not.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
Did they even have the mouse at that point, I
don't know.

Speaker 4 (07:01):
Anyway you could get it over into that box and
fit it that the pieces didn't fly down and they
didn't disappear when you would complete a line like the
classic Tetris. That would come later when he would make
it a big And that was sort of the key
basically was he found that that first version of genetic
engineering was boring, and if he made it vertical, he

(07:21):
made the piece of small, and if he made those
lines disappear as you went, that created this addictive quality
that made Tetris tetris.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
That's it. Did you say that there weren't any graphics,
that they were like characters and punctuation marks instead.

Speaker 3 (07:35):
Of ground, So, yeah, that was the first version.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
The whole thing was made up of brackets, Like each
line was brackets, and like the pieces were like exclamation
points or periods or greater than symbols. It was pretty primitive,
rough first version, but yeah, it had had kind of
the bones to it, but it wasn't until you start
clearing lines that that's what tetris is all about. So

(07:58):
around the same time he had a colleague called Dmitri
Pavlovsky was also working on games, and there was a
sixteen year old involved, young lad named Vottom Garashimov who
was a summer intern and just happened to be at
the right place at the right time, And the three
of them got together with another guy, a psychologist named
Vladimir Pokilko, and you put the four of them together

(08:20):
and you have the earliest developers of tetris.

Speaker 4 (08:24):
Yeah, he was interested in doing puzzles in relation to
his psychological experiments. Gerasimov and the other guy at Pavlovsky
were poorting games over to ibmpcs, which a lot of
people in the Soviet Union or not a lot of people,
but that was sort of one of the main computers
that they could have access to at the time, and

(08:45):
they had this idea like, hey, we might be able
to like profit from this one day, but that's going
to be a tricky thing because you know, this is
a Soviet.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
Union and everything that we do belongs to state.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
That was a great Yakov Smirnov, by the way, I
appreciate that. Yeah, so as we'll see the developers. Pajetanov
apparently was like, hey, you know, I think it'd be
a great idea if the USSR owned the rights to
this game that we developed for the first ten years.
What do you think? He had said that it was
basically an impossible choice, like if he didn't do that,

(09:21):
they would cheat him out of it and he would
probably be investigated by the KGB anyway, So he just
went along with that. But before that ever happened, there
was the game started to spread. We mentioned Pokylko, he
was a psychologist, and he took it to a copy
to the Moscow Medical Institute where he worked and was like, Hey,

(09:43):
why don't you guys try playing to see what you think?
And apparently the workers played so often that they had
to delete it from their computers because they just couldn't
be trusted with Tetris on their computers to get their
work done.

Speaker 4 (09:57):
Yeah, that became kind of a common refrain in this
as it goes along, as more and more people are like,
why are all my employees crowded around the computer monitor
and they would go in and find them playing Tetris.
It spread to like I said, IBMPC users in the
Soviet Union, was copied onto floppy disks, transported across borders,
and eventually got named Robert Stein, who owned a UK

(10:20):
based company called Andromeda Software Ltd. He saw this in Hungary.
He was like, hey, Hungary gave us the Rubik's Cube,
here's another puzzle game. This is pretty interesting to me.
So in nineteen eighty six he realized that he had
a I guess. He got a hold of a telex
number that could reach paget Nov and he sent him

(10:45):
telex and they started telexing back and forth saying like, hey,
I'm interested in this. He ultimately got a reply that said, yes,
we are interested, we would like to have this deal.
And Stein didn't realize in broken Russian that just meant yeah,
let's keep talking.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
He thought that meant, hey, sounds like we have a deal.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Right, So he actually started creating copies of it, right,
and getting ready to sell it in the West. Is
that correct?

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
Here's where it gets a little confusing, because this whole
story about who has the rights gets really in the weeds.
And what happened was Stein started he thought they had
a deal, so he started developing the launch of this
thing because he thought he had a deal when he
did not even have these rights. Like they literally made
a deal with a guy named Robert Maxwell. British newspaper mogul.

(11:38):
There's a lot more to this guy than you know.
We could probably do a whole episode on him. But
he had a couple of companies, one called spectrum Holobite
in the United States and one called Mirrorsoft in the UK,
and he made licensing deals for PC and console rights
with Mirrorsoft for the UK and Europe for three thousand
pounds plus royalties, and then for spectrum Holobite for North

(12:03):
America and Japan for eleven thousand plus royalties when he
didn't even own the rights to do so at this point.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, So apparently they were out there selling units and
then the Russians got word of this. Something called l
ORG electron or Technica, which was the Soviet organization for
developing things like games like Tetris and then owning the
rights to it, got in touch with Stein and were like, hey,
you can't do this anymore, like we own that this

(12:31):
is even Cold war stuff says that this is wrong,
you know.

Speaker 4 (12:37):
Yeah, So in January twenty nine to eighty eight, spectrum
Holobite released it in the US and he didn't get
his deal signed with l ORG because they weren't like, hey,
shut this down.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
You can't do it. They said, hey, let's talk.

Speaker 4 (12:50):
He didn't get his actual deal signed with them until
the end of February, so he was selling these things
for a month in the United States before he even
had a deal with l Org l Org And at
that point he got to think like a ten year
licensing deal from them, so it was all that part
of it was legit by this point.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, and at the time, it was almost one hundred
dollars for a copy of Tetris for IBM and sixty
eight dollars. These are in today's dollars, I should say, Yeah,
for the Commodore sixty four that's not cheap, No, for
sure not, but people were buying it because people liked it.
And apparently also Mirosof made deals with Atari and Sega

(13:28):
too to basically start producing Tetris cartridges for those consoles.
And again I think this was within that window where
he didn't officially own any of the rights at the time.

Speaker 4 (13:41):
Yeah, he didn't have those rights, so you could have
it gets a little confusing, but you can have like
PC rights, but not rights to do it on like
a handheld game or like a stand up console arcade
game or something like that, or what would to come,
which was, well, they already had Atari and stuff like that,
and Sega like you mentioned, but you know, all these
are different licenses, and this guy Stein was just kind

(14:01):
of going full steam ahead without even owning these licenses,
basically saying like, hey, I'll get these, don't worry.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
So yeah, So at the time, there was another guy
that we've got to introduce and then we'll take a
break after well after that. His name was Hank Rogers
h N. K. Rogers. He was Dutch born but grew
up in America, and at the time he was working
for a company called Bulletproof Software, a Japanese company, and

(14:27):
his job was to find games to basically develop for
the Japanese market. And one day in nineteen eighty eight,
he was at Cees in Las Vegas looking for ideas,
and one of the ideas that he came across Chuck.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
Was Tetris.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
What a pro.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
We'll be right back, Okay.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
So when we last saw Hank Rogers, he was wandering
around Cees with a pennant that said Bulletproof's number one,
eating some popcorn, and he had just stopped in front
of this booth that was playing Tetris. And he dropped
his popcorn and his pennant at the same time as
mouth agog and he was like, I have to own

(15:35):
this game, Like, we have to buy this game. And
he wanted it himself so much so that he talked
his in laws into putting up their house for collateral
so that he could have seed money to buy the
rights to this game. And he actually traveled to Moscow,
and this guy is where the Cold War stuff really
starts to kind of come alive, because he showed up

(15:58):
in Moscow and was like, let's make a deal and
they're like, that's not how it works, spy.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 4 (16:05):
I mean at this point he did make a deal
with Spectrum Hollabite for the Nintendo Famicom console, right, and
you know this is all early days, so the game
Boy had not quite debuted. That launched in eighty nine,
So it was the timing of it was really really
key because as we'll see the game Boys where it
really really took off. But he made a deal, sort

(16:27):
of a handshake deal with the president of Nintendo of
America to put Tetris in game boys. And he was like, hey, listen,
you know you sell on these game boys. You're including Mario,
which the boys love, but if you want to appel
to everyone and sell more of those include Tetris and
I think that led to like thirty five million units
of Tetris game Boy being sold.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, it was essentially the same thing. When Apple loaded
that YouTube album onto their iPhones, it was one of
the greatest commercial successes of all time. This is basically
the predecessor of that.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you said he was sort of bumbling.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
You can't leave that that was a joke, Like that
was a huge fo oh. Everybody hated that just being
like loaded on their phone and apparently you couldn't get
it off either.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Oh no, no, no, I remember that. I think I was
one of the few people it was like, oh nice,
I like you too, Thanks for the.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Song, Thanks suckers for the free album that I paid
one thousand dollars for.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
Goodness me.

Speaker 4 (17:24):
So, you mentioned that he was sort of bumbling around
Moscow and they were like, hey, no, thanks spy. He
eventually did get that meeting with l ORG because he's
still trying to secure all these different you know, license rights,
and he they weren't too pleased with him. But luckily
for him, Pagetnoff was in that meeting and he liked
Rogers and they became buddies, and that helped them secure

(17:45):
the rights on the Game Boy.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, because at the time, all of a sudden, there
was a huge competition in Moscow forgetting these rights because
it became clear Stein didn't known the rights. Therefore Maxwell
didn't known all of the rights, Nintendo didn't known all
the rights yet. So Stott Rogers was there like making
these deals and it is questionable whether he would have
come out on top had paget nonof not taken a

(18:06):
sign shine to him, but he did, and like you said,
he talked the head of Nintendo America in installing the
game on every unit. And yeah, when you sell thirty
five million units of something, it's suddenly popular. That's when
it finally blew up in the United States because again
it had been around for a few years by then,
but when the Game Boy came out with it, that
was it for Tetris. And also Nintendo is like, we're

(18:30):
the Tetris platform now from that one.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
Yeah for sure. And by the way, I did go
to eBay.

Speaker 4 (18:38):
I haven't picked the one out yet, but are there
are plenty of game Boys with the Tetris cartridges. They're
supposedly in good shape, so that's awesome. I'm definitely looking
forward to that, although Emily says I still have mine somewhere.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
It's like, all right, I'll just get it on eBay.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Like how hard can you look for that?

Speaker 3 (18:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (18:54):
And they range in price, I think, you know, some
of the more dubious ones are like thirty to forty bucks,
and I just wonder about the stickiness of buttons and
pads and things. But the one that's like one hundred
and ten, I feel like it's probably a safer bet,
but who knows.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah, you got to look out for that forty year
old caramel sauce.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
Oh god, yeah, and cotton candy and stuff like that.
But the Game Boy when though, The reason I bring
that up again is because that's the one with that
classic type a theme songh yeah from sound engineer hiro
Kozu Tanaka, which is hard to believe, but it's an

(19:37):
actually a Russian folk song called koro b a niki
which means pedlars, and you can hear like a symphony
doing that in a Russian symphony and you're like, oh,
wait a.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Minute, I know that song, that's the Tetris song.

Speaker 3 (19:50):
Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
It is, and it's if you haven't heard it in
a while ago, just look up Tetris type a theme
on utube and it'll take you back for sure.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
So there was one more challenge for the rights to Tetris,
and that ended up being between Nintendo and Atari. Like
I said, Nintendo was like, we're the platform for Tetris,
just try it, and Natari was like, We're going to
try you so much. We're so confident that we're going
to produce hundreds of thousands of copies of this game,

(20:21):
and a judge was like, nope, it's Nintendo's and Natari
had to eat the cost of all those.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
The judge was like, don't you have a burial site
for the game?

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Exactly right? Can you repurpose that?

Speaker 4 (20:35):
So they've sold a lot of these. But marketing of
the game initially was a challenge. It didn't have like
cutting edge graphics or anything. You really had to play
it really to kind of understand how addictive it was.
So just looking at the game and selling the game
was tough. So they sort of, weirdly at the time,
really leaned into the Cold War and the Soviet stuff.

(20:56):
They re skinned it to have Saint Basil's Adril and
Moscow on the title screen. They had all sorts of
little Russian Easter eggs in there. At trade shows, they
had Reagan and gorbache Off impersonators, like playing against each
other and stuff like that, and that actually helped sell
the game as this like this weird import from behind

(21:17):
the Iron Curtain, Like what are they doing over there?

Speaker 1 (21:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah, that was funny. There was a New York Times
article on it from oh, I don't know, I think
the like eighty six maybe, and they were they threw
a little bit of shade. They're like, it's kind of impressive.
This is the first software from the Soviet Union being
sold in the US, which indicates that their computers are
finally catching up to American.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
These ibmbcs.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Right, So Tetris indisputably ended the Cold War, brought down
the Soviet Union single handedly. There were no other factors
involved whatsoever. And like we said, the rights for the
game stayed with the US are for the first ten years,
and then finally when they came back around to or

(22:04):
for the first time. I guess ta pajet noov he
just started lighting ten cigars at once with one hundred
dollar bills because this is already just a worldwide smash
hit and now all of the royalties were going to
start to come to him.

Speaker 4 (22:18):
Yeah, I mean, he didn't try to fight this early on,
Like you know, if it was in the United States,
somebody would have taken him to court, probably over the
fact that like, yeah, I was your employee at the time,
but blah blah.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Blah, Like he knew that was a lost cause.

Speaker 4 (22:31):
So he never even tried to fight back, and I
think wanted to get in line as a good Russian
state employer and was like, okay, ten years, you've got it.
And you know, it turns out patience is a virtues
because he made you know, he did pretty well on
the thing in the long run.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Right, So these guys started drifting over to the United States.
And there's a really sad like kind of appendix to
this whole thing. In nineteen ninety eight, Pokyoko, who was
psychologist who is involved in developing it, found that he
had he was being looped out now that the rights
were coming to Paget and off Anne Rogers, who made

(23:08):
a separate deal without him. He was running a relatively
unsuccessful software company and apparently killed his wife and son
with a knife and then killed himself with a knife,
which is a weird enough thing that there's still today
conspiracy theories that he was killed by Russian mobsters or
the government or something like that, but a couple of

(23:31):
autopsies confirmed, like, no, this was suicide. It's really really
sad and just a weird, little bizarre kind of side
thing to be tacked on to, you know, what's just
widely considered such a fun pastime around the world.

Speaker 4 (23:47):
Yeah, there's a documentary or docuseries rather called The Tetris
Murderers about this, and I did not watch it, but
I looked more into this, and I'm not conspiracy minded
at all, but this seems very very pinky. There were
three murder weapons to kill his wife and kid and himself.
There were two different hammers and a hunting knife. Multiple

(24:09):
murder weapons is just strange. There were documents burned on
a grill. Everybody to a person, they talked to her
like this guy was a super good dude, loving father
and husband, Like, there's no way he could have done
something this brutal. Apparently the blood spatter analysis made no
sense at all, and there were other people that were

(24:29):
asked to sign off that were like, I'm not going
to sign off on this, Like, there's no way this
guy slit his own throat, look at the blood. And
they also found a note that they initially said was
not a suicide note, but they would eventually say it was,
and it said I've been eaten alive, Vladimir. Just remember
that I am exist the devil. It's very strange, it is,

(24:53):
so I don't know, a lot of this stuff doesn't
add up.

Speaker 3 (24:55):
So I'm not really sure what the deal is.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
No, for sure. I think the one criticism is that
the docu series doesn't actually say why anybody would have
wanted to kill him and his family.

Speaker 4 (25:06):
But yes, everything I say, Russian mobs, that's all you
need to say.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah, yeah, it does kind of explain a lot. So,
like you said, there's a movie I think it's on
Apple TV that came out last year about this that
you can see. I can't remember what it's called, Tetris something, right,
I think it's just Tetris.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Oh, okay, what's his name? The Kingsman, Tarin Jaron Edgerton.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yet I think of a more resultant John.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
I do too. I like that guy. I think he's
a very talented actor.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Oh god, I hope he's not a monstrous scumbag.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
I do too.

Speaker 4 (25:40):
We walked that fine line of like saying something nice
about someone, are they a monstrous scumbag? Or say something
bad about someone and we'll just get back to them, right.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, you have a good track record of calling it though.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Well I got one. I got Jared back in the day.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
That's about it, because that was a mega one. That
was a huge way to nobody was thinking that about
that guy.

Speaker 4 (26:04):
Speaking of that guy, should we take another break or
should we talk about gameplay first?

Speaker 2 (26:08):
We'll take another break.

Speaker 4 (26:09):
It feels like, all right, let's break and we'll talk
about how you actually play this thing right after this. Okay,

(26:40):
So if you want to play, if you've never played Tetris,
you know, a lot of this kind of assumes with
that many hundreds of millions of games sold, plus many
more people that played that didn't actually buy it, that
most people have probably played this game. But the idea
is that you know, you have this horizontal screen and
these different shape blocks are coming down, and when you

(27:03):
do a complete horizontal line across with these different shape blocks,
that line will disappear, and all this time more blocks
are falling and falling and falling. And the key is
to get to different levels by you know, completing more
and more lines, and they start going faster and faster,
and you can you can spin them to get them
into position and into place, and in different versions of

(27:25):
the game, you can see what's coming. Sometimes just one,
sometimes a few, and there are other variations along the years,
But that's the basic gameplay of Tetris is very very
simple game.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
That was the best, basic, most succinct explanation of Tetras
I have ever heard.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Really.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Was it good though?

Speaker 2 (27:41):
For sure? Yeah, okay, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
It was the best.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
I just thought you meant that was short and that'll suffice.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
No, No, I thought it was great. Okay, thanks, because
you could have gone on longer. But why you said
it all just precisely so. It was very economical and efficient,
and I appreciate that.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Thank you, friend.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
There's also multiplayer versions with which means that there's a
lot of competitive Tetris championships. There's one in particular, and
the Classic Tetris World Championship, I believe is the biggest
of them all, but some of the things that they've
come up with. So Tetris was just basically the same
for a very long time, and then when the rights
reverted to paget Nov, they started experimenting with it making

(28:20):
it a little different some of what you included in there.
But one of the things that is pretty cool about
multiplayer play is that when you start doing things like
if you clear multiple lines at once, it's a Tetris combo,
you can be rewarded by garbage being thrown to your
player's screen and that'll be you know, a few lines,
sometimes a bunch of lines that have like a really

(28:44):
inconvenient break in the line which makes it really hard
to clear. And also it just pushed their regular screen
up that much closer to the top, which is where
you die if you can die in Tetris. So there's
like a lot of like kind of interesting things that
they did with this really basic game that it didn't
seem like it could be improved upon without really just
being unnecessary. They seem to have come up with some

(29:05):
really good ideas for it.

Speaker 4 (29:07):
Yeah, and I think did you mention that a true
Tetris is when you get what is it, I guess
four levels at once.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, when you throw down that coveted eye piece and
you're satisfying and yeah, exactly, that is a Tetris.

Speaker 4 (29:25):
Oh boy, that's satisfying. I remember that feeling. I can't
wait to get that game boy. Should we talk about
the pieces because you found some kind of cool stuff,
as did Libya. That I never knew is that these
pieces have names.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, there's a bunch of slang names. There's a Tetris
wiki that has a bunch of slang names. But somebody
posted on Reddit a few years ago and the original
Nintendo manual for it, and it has like the official
Nintendo name. So we'll give you all of them or
some of them.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
All right, the J and the shape also refers to
or the letter refers to sort of the shape of
the piece, right, yes, okay, So the J is the
blue one. I never knew that there were colors because
on Game Boy obviously it was not colored. The initial ones,
but the blue one can also be called the gamma
or the the gee or ge or I think the

(30:13):
is official, the blue Ricky, the blue Ricky.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah, that's the official one. There's an orange Ricky. That's
the L piece, which is basically the mirror of the
J It's also called jed or right elbow orange Ricky.
You don't really, you can't improve on that. It sounds
like a disgusting drink. Yeah, you know, like a creamsicle
cruise ship drink gin Ricky.

Speaker 4 (30:36):
Yeah, oh boy, you might be onto something.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
What is a gin Ricky?

Speaker 2 (30:43):
It's gin lime and I think a little sweetener. Maybe
it's really simple, and I think club soda. It's a
pretty old drink, so.

Speaker 4 (30:51):
Kind of like a Gin and Tonic without but with
soda instead of tonic and a little sweet.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah, yes, I believe so. I think that's a pretty
good disc. Man, you're just killing it with the descriptions today.

Speaker 3 (31:03):
How about this the yellow cube. It's a square, Oh
my god, genius. That's known. You can call it square
or the zero or the smash Boy.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, that's the official name of smash Boy. Can't improve
on that one either. The S is the green piece.
It's the right facing zigzag piece.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Some people call it the right zigzag er right squiggly.
But the official Nintendo name was the Rhode island Z.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
That sounds like a sex position.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
It does for sure. Wow, that's great. Z.

Speaker 4 (31:36):
There is a Z is the mirror, the red mirror
of the Z, and that is you can call a
lightning bolt or the left dog or the left snake
or the Cleveland Z also, but I said.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
Before, yeah, it's just more disappointing than the road. Oh
there's the T, the T piece that actually is used
in the Tetris logo. And the tea is called the
te wei.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
The tee wee.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (32:06):
And then that god that I called it the I beam,
But that's the Cyan four line clearer. That's also the
one that if you if you put it in the
wrong place, it can really screw you.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
But that can produce that full Tetris. You call it
the stick, the line, the slim gym, the long skinny one.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
The hero is the official name for it though.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
Oh okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Mm hmm. That's where that song, that Enrique Iglesias song
comes from. It's about Tetris. A little known fact.

Speaker 3 (32:38):
So did you mention the championship?

Speaker 2 (32:42):
No, yes, I did. The classic Tetris World Championship. That's
the big one. And they still use the original n
Ees version, the one that I played, and you and
me played, and everybody but you played.

Speaker 4 (32:52):
Apparently that's right, which is a key distinction when it
comes to competing. I guess because that would have been
I would have been pretty lost, although there's no way
I could. I wasn't like competition level. I was just
okay at it.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
But dude, competition level is inc when it comes to Tetris.

Speaker 4 (33:08):
No, when you watch like real time speeds of what
these people are doing, it's crazy. Like that's when I'm like,
I mean, I'm way done by that by the time
they start going that fast.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah. Because the Nintendo controller, the original one, the rectangle
with two buttons like two red buttons, and then a
dpad the directional pad like it's it works for certain
kinds of games and certain kind of movements, usually with
two thumbs. But with Tetris, the big part is to
move the piece around, and you want to move a

(33:39):
lot of pieces really fast and move on to the
next one.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Which you're sending them.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yes, which means that you have to you have to
press the d pad really fast, and the deep pad
was not made for being pressed fast. So, like you said,
people have come up with some amazing techniques for competitive play.

Speaker 4 (33:58):
Yeah, if you're trying to get something going down that's
coming down very very fast all the way over and
fitted one on the left side of the screen, it's
dropped on the right. You got to hit that deep
aad like go go, go, go go, And you can
only do that, like you know, there's humans can only
go so fast until they invented hyper tapping, which is
about twenty eleven. According to Libya's research, which I found

(34:21):
that to be pretty much true for early twenty tens.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
It checks out. That means you're like.

Speaker 4 (34:30):
You're sort of vibrating your thumb actually instead of pressing it,
you're sort of vibrating your you're like flexing your bicep,
so you're not fully releasing and pressing.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
It's just like a hyper press, a hypertap.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Right, So if you if you're trying that right now,
and you're like, I don't see how that works. Apparently
a very very few gifted individuals can actually yah hyper tap,
which means that hyper tapers dominated competition for a good
ten or so years. About ten years there was a
kid named Joe Seeley or Saley I'm sorry, Joseph, and

(35:04):
he was sixteen at the time. Back in twenty eighteen,
he reached level thirty one. I don't think we said
just using like normal movements on the Nees controller, no
one makes it past level twenty nine. Yeah, you just don't.
This kid made it to level thirty one using hyper tapping.
In twenty eighteen he made it to level thirty five

(35:25):
and twenty twenty so at the time, that makes him
the greatest Tetris player of all time to that point.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (35:31):
So then in twenty twenty comes along a guy named
Christopher Martinez, also known as Cheese capital Z capital Z.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Yeah, I think the capital Z makes it cheese Z.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
Oh that you're probably right, that's my take on it. No,
I think you're totally right.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Okay, well we should say Christopher Martinez aka Cheese aka Cheesez,
and we'll get it in there somewhere.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
So he introduced a technique called rolling. It's also called
fly hecking HCCI after a guy named Hector Fly Rodriguez
who developed this technique on arcade game consoles, not even
for Tetris, just on arcade game console. Like, you know
how to press the buttons faster, and I'm gonna do

(36:15):
a little audio, Josh, if you'll allow, because did you
see how this was done? Did you see Hector's fingers?

Speaker 1 (36:22):
I did.

Speaker 4 (36:24):
It's amazing. This guy has like they look like break
dancing fingers. They're just so fluid. But it's if you
imagine like a stand up arcade game and those big
round buttons. If you want to press that really fast,
you can go tap tap tap tap tap tap with
one finger, or you can do this with your fore fingers.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
Very nice.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
Did that come through you? So that's what he's doing.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
He's using all four fingers to you know, kind of
like the on board thing when you do that on
a table. He did that on a button and found like, boy,
that's even faster than the fastest hyper tapping and cheesy
geez uh No, I don't know stole that, but he
got that from him. So what you do in the
case of a Nintendo, because they have tiny little buttons,

(37:09):
you can't do that with your poor fingies. No, you
hold the dpad down just enough for it to engage,
and then you do that to the back of the thing,
and it essentially is making your dpad move that fast
because it's already engaged and you're going really fast.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Right to the back of the controller.

Speaker 4 (37:30):
Right to the back of the controller, making the back
of the controller essentially one large button.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, and it's just kind of jumping up and hitting
your thumb. That was another great explanation, Chuck Man.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
That's a tough one because you really got to see
it in action.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
But you still you did it great hyper tapping. The
best hyper tappers can hit the button about seven times
a second, boggling. What about roller with rolling People like
Cheesy can hit it twenty times a second? What times
a second? And Cheesy obviously was starting to reach new

(38:04):
heights as well a least I believe, still one of
the premier Tetris players in the world, and it started
to get people like between Joseph Saley and Christopher or
Cheesy like they were like, okay, people can get past
level twenty nine. How many levels do you think there
are in Tetris? And of course there's not like some
point where the Nintendo developers were like, Okay, that's it.

(38:25):
You won the game at level of hundred. Just like
many other games, they just let it go and go
and go, and then eventually the game just stops functioning.
There's some zero that doesn't get carried, or some number
of resets, you reach some crazy bit configuration and the
thing just crashes. But that's just never been done with

(38:46):
Tetris because they figured out using bots that it was
somewhere between level one hundred and fifty five and the
mid two hundreds. Right twenty nine is where the best
normal players max out. In the thirties is where Joseph
Saley was maxing out. This is like up to like
two hundred and fifty. And there was a kid.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Who, oh man beat the game.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
A human, not a bot.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
A kid.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
I've seen him with my own eyes on the TV
and he was not a bot.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
How old was he? What's his name? Give this kid
his due?

Speaker 2 (39:19):
He was thirteen years old at the time. This was
December of twenty twenty three, so about a year ago.
He was in Oklahoma. His name was Willis Gibson. Blue
Scootie was his player name.

Speaker 3 (39:31):
Yeah, are you going to drop the level? I think
you should, all right. This guy, after playing for thirty
eight minutes, hit level one fifty seven and crashed five
times as much as the best players in the world
and crashed the system and every that's a system.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
That's how excited you are.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
That's very weird.

Speaker 4 (39:52):
I was, and everybody was going crazy over this kid,
except for paget no Nov who said, yeah, well, you
know you beat the forty year old version of game.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Nice accomplishment, right, Yeah, he said, the Tetris itself, the
pure like the theoretical version of the game, you could
never beat it.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
Yeah, I get it, I guess, But come on, man.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
I know I thought that too, Like it's a thirteen
year old you're talking to buddy.

Speaker 4 (40:19):
All right, So we talked a little we'll finish with
Tetris on the brain, because we started the show talking
about Tetris getting into your dreams, getting into your when
you're packing your car. I still call that tetrising, as
do a lot of people when you're packing stuff, packing
moving trucks. It's kind of the vernacular now, but it
does have very distinct impacts on your brain, right, and

(40:40):
usually in a good way.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Yeah, again, we said it was called the Tetris effect.
There's a guy named Jeffrey Goldsmith who's a writer who
is known for coining I don't know if he coined
a term or it just was the first to apply
it to Tetris, but he called Tetris a pharmatronic, which
is like an addictive drug but in software form. Yeah,
I'm peasant and off. Ever, the contrarian said, like, no,

(41:02):
it's more like an earworm.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
Right, is it with this guy?

Speaker 2 (41:07):
I don't know. He likes to be right, I think,
but so yeah, So people have taken wide note of
the fact that Tetris seems to be way more addictive
on way more people than just about any other game,
and so people have kind of investigated what the what
the deal is behind that. I know at least one
writer chalked it up to what's called the zigger Nick effect, that.

Speaker 4 (41:32):
Is super cool that was coined by a psychologist in Russia. Bluma, well,
biggerin I'm sorry, Ziggernick.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
What a great first name.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
I think it's Zigernick.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Okay, well, you know me and eis and European pronunciations.
I know.

Speaker 4 (41:49):
This is in the nineteen thirties, and she noticed that
at restaurants, when a server had a large table of like,
let's say, twelve people, they could remember their orders, which
was remarkable, but then when it came time to deliver
food to the table, they had forgotten them. So the
idea here is that the you know, with the Zygernic effect,
is that the brain really really wants to store information

(42:11):
about a task that isn't complete yet, right like taking
an order for twelve or in the case of Tetris,
they're exploiting it by like constantly creating a little unfinished
mission to create a line of blocks that you get
fulfilled and then they drop another one. So it's just
triggering this constant feeling of satisfaction because you're completing these

(42:33):
tasks by completing these lines over and over and.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Over, and then after you complete one, you have another
task to do, so your brain is activated again, like
you said, moment by moment, over and over and over again.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
Pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
It is super cool. There is another guy named Richard
Higher or I'm sure in your pronunciation, Heyer, who in
nineteen ninety one back in yeah, in ninety one, at
uc Irvine, he actually the brains of Tetris players and
he found that the brain is much more engaged when

(43:07):
you're new to Tetris, which is probably a reason why
it became such a popular game. It just sucks in
new players and that you start using way more energy
in your brain when you start playing Tetris and then
it kind of goes down over time as you get better,
and that apparently is when most people stop playing tetris
after a while, when they get really good at it,
because the brain's no longer being challenged like it was

(43:29):
originally thanks to the Zygernick effect.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (43:32):
Yeah, there have been other studies, of course. There was
one that found that tetris may reduce the strength of cravings.
This is in twenty fifteen by the British and Australian psychologists.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Oh the British Indus is that a band?

Speaker 3 (43:50):
I thought that was the name of me. Yeah, it's
like a British seapower. One of my favorite bits, right.

Speaker 4 (43:57):
Yeah, so just by psychologists in Britain and all Tralia,
I think basically where they used iPods to check in
with undergraduates seven times a day to see if they
are craving drugs, food, sex and other things.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
They just said, yeah, that you might create.

Speaker 4 (44:13):
Yeah, They're like, we're undergrads, duh h and playing Tetris
for three minutes lessen the cravings. I am curious if
that's just because they're preoccupied with it. They argued that
it was effective because it involved because cravings involve working
memory and visualizing the object of desire.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
So maybe that is it.

Speaker 4 (44:33):
You're occupied with another cognitive task so much that you're
not thinking about the heroin you want to do, and
you're destroyer.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
Right, And one of the great things about cravings is
if you can write it out or distract yourself or
something like that, when you come back from that task,
your brain very rarely goes right back to the craving. Yeah,
that's amazing. They also figured out, for probably the exact
same reasons or similar reasons, they believe that it can
prevent pts from forming, which is a little weird. It's like,

(45:02):
you just had a traumatic experience. Quick play tetris, right,
More likely it will help you get treat PTSD. Very
similar to EMDR where you watch like a pen or
a ball on a screen or something like that. This
is playing tetris while you're recounting your traumatic experience. Your
memory recatalogs into something far less traumatic thanks to your

(45:27):
working memory being occupied while you're doing this other thing too.
It's we should do an episode on em d R someday.
It's just insane how effective it can be.

Speaker 4 (45:36):
Yeah, for sure, I'd be a way into that. They
also found that potentially your brain might physically change, and
then if you play Tetris enough, you might have a
thicker cerebral cortices and more flexible cortical corticoll matter. So
maybe your cognitive functioning and memory could improve. Although there
have been other studies Weirdly, this is very strange to

(45:58):
me that found that playing Tetris does not improve things
like a spatial cognition, and you would think that's the
one thing it would help with.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yeah, I think it still helps with visio spatial arrangement,
like you said, packing a car. Oh okay, but it doesn't.
You can't see something and be like, how what's right
side up? For this shape that I'm showing you a
picture of. You can't just immediately say like, oh, it
should be to the left or something like that, like
just that specific thing. I think it still does help,
although I didn't see any studies. It's just how could

(46:29):
it not? You know?

Speaker 3 (46:30):
I agree?

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Studies?

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Be damned you got anything else on tetris?

Speaker 3 (46:36):
I have nothing else. I can't wait for that game boy.

Speaker 4 (46:38):
I'll report back with pictures at Chuck the podcast or Instagram.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Oh nice, I gotta put this Kutsu pictures up. Hadn't
done it?

Speaker 2 (46:45):
Oh yeah, you need to, man, Yeah, yeah, you got to.
You put it on the podcast. You got to deliver, Chuck.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
I have to deliver, Josh.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Well, since Chuck says he has to deliver, and that
was an agreement to me saying he has to deliver, obviously,
we've unlocked listener mail.

Speaker 4 (47:05):
This is a timely one because our bet date has
passed and we got a few of these from people.
Hey guys, I'm from Brazil and I started listening to
your show during the pandemic. But I love those older
episodes and I was recently listening to one from November
twenty nineteen, Augmented Reality Coming Soon. At the beginning of
the episode, Josh and Clark, we get that a lot.

Speaker 3 (47:29):
That's okay.

Speaker 4 (47:29):
I'm sure my tombstone's a Charles w Chuck Clark Bryant.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
I will see to it that it does.

Speaker 4 (47:36):
If I outlook you, well, I'm gonna be between you
and you me so you can constantly just be talking over.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Me, Okay, kid, that's what we should do.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
It should do you me, me, you Emily.

Speaker 4 (47:47):
Okay, and then we're not going to talk about pets
or children, because that's too sad.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
What if we just did like a mass burial together
and save some money?

Speaker 4 (47:55):
Oh yeah, just or skybarell plow us all up in
the mountain and then let the crozyatus or whatever vultures.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah, but I'm sure shipping our cadavers would be kind
of expensive.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
That's true. All right, Well, we'll work this out anyway.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
Josh and Clark made a bet that in five years,
augmented reality glasses would be all the rage, because Josh
said that he thought they would be commonplace by Halloween
twenty twenty four.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
Here we are, Josh, what do you.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Think that doesn't sound like something I'd say in retrospect?

Speaker 4 (48:25):
Well, Elisa says, I think Chuck won this one. It
is funny though. Recently, as someone I know saw me
had my camera because it was an event. I was
taking pictures and I said, can I take your picture?
And he said sure, and I took his picture. Then
he went, now can I take yours? And he touched
his glasses and looked at me and walked away. And

(48:45):
I was like, that dude's wearing photography glasses.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
No, I knew the guy.

Speaker 4 (48:52):
Those meta ray bands that you can like whatever, interact
online through your glasses basically what there's Yeah, that's what
you would be commonplace.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
I think you didn't chase after him and say like, hey,
I never said yes.

Speaker 3 (49:05):
No I didn't. Well, I just thought i'd expose it. Here.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
There you go. Now we know you want to say
his name in street address, I do not. All right, Well,
since Chuck told an anecdote about an anonymous friend using
Google glasses and I lost a bet, then we have
to sign off by thanking whoever wrote this email? Who
was it again?

Speaker 3 (49:27):
Alisa from Brazil.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
Oh that's right, Thanks a lot, Alisa from Brazil. We
appreciate it big time. Thank you for pointing out that
I lost to Betsy Chuck. Hopefully there was no money
on it, was there?

Speaker 1 (49:38):
Do you know?

Speaker 3 (49:40):
No money as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
And if you want to be like Alsa from Brazil,
you can email us as well at stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.